On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1904, it appears as a hachured raised ring, roughly twenty metres across, the kind of marking that cartographers used to indicate a low, rounded bank rising from the ground. By 1938, when the surveyors came back through, the same spot was recorded instead as a circular depression about twelve metres in diameter. A raised feature had apparently become a hollow, or else the two surveys were capturing different things entirely.

What exactly the earthwork represents is unclear, and the question has since become academic in a particular way: the site cannot now be located on the ground because the area has been absorbed into a forest plantation. This is not an unusual fate for low-lying archaeological features in Ireland. Conifer planting, especially the commercial afforestation that expanded rapidly through the mid-twentieth century, buried or disturbed a considerable number of earthworks before systematic field survey could catch up with them. The discrepancy between the two OS records is itself a small puzzle worth noting. A hachured circular raised area of twenty metres is broadly consistent with a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks. A hollow of twelve metres might suggest some degree of collapse or quarrying in the intervening decades, or simply a different surveyor interpreting the same degraded feature in different terms.